


The Violent Death of the Goddess Ajora, trans. Verna Thorngage, University of Ellesmere Press, 1329 P.Y.

by Aria



Category: Mistworld Fictional TV Series Campaign
Genre: Epic Poetry, F/F, Milton eat your heart out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 21:53:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20803559
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aria/pseuds/Aria
Summary: This is a story about new things built upon the bones of the old.





	The Violent Death of the Goddess Ajora, trans. Verna Thorngage, University of Ellesmere Press, 1329 P.Y.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [feedingonwind](https://archiveofourown.org/users/feedingonwind/gifts).

_Translator's note: conflicting sources argue for Ajora's first death taking place at different times during the narrative. In some translations, Ajora accepts Saren Raithe's binding as a price for the power that speeds her towards revenge for her friend's abandonment of her. In others, Ajora and Kithri were both executed for the same crime, with Kithri's resurrection into Alokas via Olidammara's blessing mirroring Ajora's transformation into a vampire via Saren Raithe's magic. The second interpretation is artistically compelling, but comes from a variant of the poem that is dated fully two centuries after the first instance of the text. Although I strove in this translation to be lyrically pleasant to the modern ear, my primary aim was to keep as much of the original feel and content of the text as possible. Therefore, I keep to the older interpretation, and revenge as Ajora's driving motive in the early sections of the poem._

*

Listen: there was once a woman named Ajora.  
She was raised in a city that has since been consumed  
by forests, before those trees were razed again,  
and a new city was built upon the bones of the old.

This is a story about new things built upon the bones of the old.

Ajora, still young, loved the yield of flesh to a knife  
and the blessing of blood flowing over her hands.  
She joined a confederacy of killers and took coin for lives ended,  
though she would have done it for the joy of death alone.  
With her in that time were her companions:  
an orc whose name is long lost, but who the sages say  
was called Luck, the foretelling of his friends' fate;  
and the halfling then called Kithri, whose exploits,  
mischiefs, fickle fortunes and transformations have been told down the ages.  
For years upon years they took on bloody tasks as one,  
seizing life from petty thieves and would-be emperors, each  
as easily rendered unto death as the other. 

And then came the day of the betrayal. The orc called Luck  
does not enter into this tale, for he was but mortal, and his will  
has never moved the world. The will of the gods transforms our mortal plane  
into a place of theater and wonder. On that day of betrayal,  
the will of the gods was Olidammara's will, when that chief among rogues  
and patron of luck reached down to Kithri and granted the gift  
of a second chance. On that day of betrayal, Kithri was  
uncautious and had, in the course of dark deeds, been caught  
by the forces of order abroad in the since-crumbled city.  
Kithri was clapped in irons and dragged to the gallows,  
and Ajora, soon to be the dark mirror to the gallows-god,   
wept to see the gift of death turn its terrible gaze upon her friend.

What of the betrayal? That soon followed: for mere days after witnessing   
that worst of deaths, Kithri's small body swinging on the gallows-rope,  
Ajora heard rumors of her friend new-bodied, new-named,  
Alokas who was Olidammara-touched and Olidammara-blessed,   
without word to Ajora of that survival. Alas! for as luck is a two-sided coin,  
thus so is betrayal; as in Ajora's eyes Kithri new-made Alokas had abandoned her,  
so Alokas who was Kithri believed it was Ajora's duplicity  
that had brought the forces of order down to render death.

Duplicity is not the province of violence, which is swift and honest and terrible.  
Duplicity is not the province of luck, which is ever-changing  
but never committed to the course of one enduring falsehood.  
Duplicity is the province of another, of the one whose name  
is whispered in the dark spaces after luck runs out, and who whispers back.  
"I will help you survive," the whisper says, "for a price."  
Kithri new-made Alokas was fortunate, imbued with luck  
by that benevolent trickster who passed the luck along to his successor,  
Alokas who was Kithri wearing his blessings and his mask.  
Poor violent Ajora! luck was not hers, and in her fury,  
and amidst her thoughts of revenge, she was approached by that one  
who we now call the Survival of Foresight, and in whose honor  
we adorn our arms with clear-clinging greaves in his name.   
In those days the Survival of Foresight approached Ajora   
in her wrong-directed grief, and said, as he always says,   
"I will help you survive, for a price."

She accepted. Oh, beware: the price of survival is terrible.  
And oh, rejoice: the path of godhood is one of transformation,   
the new upon the bones of the old, which Saren Raithe, all unknowing  
of what Ajora would become, granted to her, both blessing and curse,  
as two-sided as betrayal, as two-sided as luck. She accepted.  
Thus was Ajora transformed by Saren Raithe, still mortal then,  
and even then imbued with the gifts of his dread parentage:  
the wisdom and cunning of an Ancient Green, poisonous swamp-queen,  
and the demon-knowledge of the long-destroyed genth,   
of whom the Master Winger was the sole survivor. Survival and foresight  
had his ancestors known, and so Saren Raithe knew,  
bending all his will and power and knowledge toward his ascension  
among those gods we love and worship still. He was mortal then  
and dreaded death above all things, wishing to control it.  
So he offered Ajora a ritual of blood and life unending, tools for her vengeance.  
He transformed her into something death could not touch,  
swift and terrible, with teeth sharper even than the blade of the sacred glaive.

So did Ajora's first life end. No longer mortal,  
she took the form of her creator's fears, a magic-made monster  
controlled but barely by all the rituals he knew.  
Saren Raithe was well-versed in that dark art called Naming,  
dread rite of the vanished genth, who in their hubris  
had summoned forth devils and demons whose surface-names they knew,  
but in whose secret hearts, guarded against all learning, truer names dwelt.   
Those demons and devils, denizens of the nether-realms   
where no mortal eye should turn its gaze, rose in revolt  
against their proud captors, and thus destroyed them --  
all but the Master Winger, pure-minded, clear-eyed, who in her parents' pride  
had seen disaster. She made allies and lovers of the poison queen  
and of the Cosmic Architect, and with these by her side  
did she avoid her people's fate. Would that Saren Raithe did  
as the Master Winger had done! No good can come of two wills entwining  
if one will goes to that binding all unknowing. So it was with Ajora,  
who took Saren Raithe's offer without understanding the price. 

In Ajora's second life of deathless violence, her will was not   
her own. She was a tool for the Survival of Foresight  
to use as he liked, one tool among an array he could call forth at his bidding,  
to scour the lands for his own betrayers; in this way, he and Ajora were  
much alike. Both saw what stories they wished to see, and both struck out  
in violent anger against those they had loved and lost,   
the vampire and the would-be god striving to overtake the luck   
that had outpaced them. Ajora was chief among Saren Raithe's creatures,  
but others he had, in those days bound also to his cause and control,  
who would later transform themselves in glory to divinity.  
First, the lesser god, at Saren Raithe's side still, clothed in darkness,  
wreathed in flame, called Chief Among Balors, the demon-lord  
whose truest name Saren Raithe knew, and whose loyalty is without question.  
Second, the brother in shadows, untimely torn from the hearth-goddess  
when they were both yet children, a sacrifice to the Underground King  
which Saren Raithe stole away, making a second sacrifice of him,  
shadow brother into undead thrall, so cunningly done that  
even the King of Shadows did not see it. Third, the paladin of death.

She came from a broken world, laid waste by the cracks in fate  
through which a terrible nothingness rushed, in those days  
when our not-yet-gods wandered betwixt dying worlds, lamenting  
that which they did not understand, the death-throes of a universe  
that would soon give birth to their godhood. Ash, death-paladin,  
left her broken world to follow the Survival of Foresight, thinking both noble,  
believing his cause. In happy times perhaps it would have been enough.  
But Saren Raithe, betrayal-stung, trusted nothing and no one  
save himself. He called Ash to his side, and bound her.

In that time, there were rituals even the Survival of Foresight did not know.  
He hungered for them, those hoards of knowledge which might  
in extremity save him. One ritual he coveted above all else:  
a binding not of force but of friendship, the creation of the copper-goddess,  
patron of dragons, author of the arcane, blessed Itzal.  
In mortal form she discovered that most sacred of rites,  
the Bond of Friendship, that which ties the patrons of luck and family  
together still, that which the Shieldmaiden Protector will grant   
her most faithful. Not yet was the Bond of Friendship an eternal tie  
between Rai and Alokas who was Kithri; not yet was the Bond of Friendship   
a boon for Merineth to grant. It was but an idea,   
Itzal's greatest, upon which the fate of the world hinged.

Saren Raithe, cunning deceiver, stole it.

Do not say the Survival of Foresight perverted a sacred rite  
for dark ends. Darkness too is blessed, by the brother in shadows,  
by the Underground King, by the Survival of Reckless Fortune.   
Darkness is blessed even by the ruler of defied fate,   
whose vassal Brandark takes his errands to deep realms and unknown places   
beyond mortal thought. Darkness too is blessed, and Saren Raithe  
sought to twist the rite to his own ends, all unknowing  
that the Bond of Friendship cannot be bent awry. It cannot be coerced,   
for it is not so easily broken as a false vow or the falling-out of lovers;  
it cannot be built upon anything but mutual agreement  
of the heart. Saren Raithe, all unknowing, bound  
Ajora to Ash, and Ash to Ajora, thinking to control  
something sacred and true and untouchable;  
so did death and violence meet.

Who can tell what they felt for one another, in those early days entwined?  
Death is the great silence; violence is an intimacy of body,  
not of secrets. Neither Ash nor Ajora will ever give up  
the intricacies of their hearts. Even the sages can but suppose  
that Ash might have seen a horror in Ajora's bloodshed, that Ajora  
might have been unmoved by the sterile precision of Ash's craft;  
or perhaps that they found in one another a kinship, an understanding  
of the beauty of a life ended, whatever path that life took to its end.  
The only certainty is in this: the deeds they did, each for the other.

Ash worked, tireless, to hunt down those former friends of Ajora's,   
and of Saren Raithe's also; on nothing else could they agree,  
but on the treachery of Alokas who was Kithri they found accord.  
Ash went to poison Kithri new-made Alokas, and Rai robot-mother,  
Itzal half-dragon and Leila silver-tongued, Merineth their protector  
and Athol, his fate still unlearned. These companions,  
not yet holy, were Ash's targets, for the wound in Ajora's soul  
was a wound in her own, the poison in Ajora's heart and  
the poison in Saren Raithe's words becoming the poison  
on Ash's blade. But with their gifts of luck and perception and   
quick-thinking wit did our gods discover Saren Raithe's deception,  
and so turned Ash from enemy to cautious ally. And so then   
did Ash work, tireless, to free Ajora from Saren Raithe's grasp,  
to free them both from the Survival of Foresight, who in seeing all else  
did not predict that the patron of reckless violence and   
the assassin of precise death might find accord in their desire to be bound  
to each other alone, and not to him. Even the sages do not know  
the intricacies of Ajora's heart, but this much is true:  
unleashed, she would have killed Saren Raithe without hesitation, and  
unleashed, she returned to Ash, who had learned of the true betrayals   
and the false, and therefore placed her trust in none around her  
save Ajora alone.

For her part Ajora acted according to her nature, loving  
the yield of flesh to a knife, and the blessing of blood flowing   
over her hands. In her second life, there was no bounty of coin  
for lives taken, but something truer: Ajora, for all she was bound,  
answered not to the Survival of Foresight, but to Ash,  
death-goddess and violence entangled, and with violence  
protected her. The universe in its death-throes, not yet renewed,  
spat out monsters, shambling creatures of nightmare which Ash  
knew of old. Ash, wishing justice for her broken world, fought  
those monsters, time and again, and time and again was Ash  
wounded by them, wounds as grievous as those cracks in fate  
through which the terrible nothingness rushed. Ajora,  
fierce and wild, refused the nothingness, and used the Bond  
of Friendship, sacred, by Saren Raithe misunderstood,   
to fight back all which might do Ash harm. Little wonder  
that shambling nightmares and wounds of fate could  
not touch Ajora! Her own sacred glaive, inseparable from   
the goddess of violence, is a terrible warning: all who touch it are  
consumed with rage, rejoice only in battle, lust only for death.  
Little wonder that she for whom that glaive was meant  
would have no trouble overcoming something so insignificant   
as the monsters of a broken world ending.  
Ajora stood between Ash and annihilation, and beat it back.

Know this: that which wrecks, also renews.  
Beset by those wounds meant for Ash, which troubled Ajora not,  
their harm was only great enough to free her. Ajora,  
bleeding Ash's own blood, was dealt such damage that  
the spell with which Saren Raithe had bound her came undone.  
Did she not try to take her revenge? Perhaps. But the Survival  
of Foresight had long known her desire for vengeance, and  
Ajora could not touch him. Did she not try to free herself from Ash,  
that bond also imposed against their wills? No: it was not spellcraft  
that entwined them then, but a deeper regard, and the understanding  
that death and violence are one. Even now, ascended to their godhood,  
they are bound still.

Listen: new things are built upon the bones of the old.

Out of a dying universe did ours come. Out of death  
did our gods come, too: Kithri new-made Alokas, hung in offering;  
the Cosmic Architect, vanished and returned;   
Itzal, passed out of and into new worlds;  
Athol, trying and retrying endless iterations of fate defied;  
the brothers in shadow, rescued from oblivion twice over by  
their sister, from whom all adamantanes stem;   
Ash, patron of death, and Ajora her dark mirror and constant companion.  
As they love one another, so do we love them, and praise them  
for this world, born of the performance of blood and death.

The blessings of the gods go with you.


End file.
